Houses

Some talk yesterday about the passage of time and its effects on the changing face of hometowns and the confusion, surprise and sense of loss that these changes foster in old eyes looking back through the filter of youthful memories. There’s a pretty good chance the surprise is multiplied when eyes are turned to the house you grew up in, if it happens to still be standing. And I suppose for many of us that is the case.

My family moved to Baton Rouge from Mississippi in 1948, Daddy Clyde going to work in a lumber company on Florida Boulevard. The five of us moved into one of Aunt Emmy’s houses across the street from Coco Lumber, rooms where earlier tenants had left their shades upon closets and bedrooms. I was too young to notice the arrival in Louisiana, and my first memories of 340 Wabash come at a later time.

The images are strongest some years later, those between twelve and eighteen when I had my own room thanks to Daddy’s decision to build an addition onto the house when two bedrooms became too few for five. Not surprisingly, life changed after I got my own room. And it’s those changes and those days and nights that captured my attention on Tuesday.

In 1996 my sister and I made a visit to Baton Rouge for the purpose of resolving issues with the old house on Wabash. Since our mother’s death it had been home to a string of temporary part-timers, and was in dire need of serious attention. The last renters had run out, leaving the place with a post-tornado look. Not the solution we’d expected, but within a couple of weeks a buyer turned up and we sold the old Childhood Library of Memories for a fair amount. For my part, in selling the house a hard kernel of sadness came with the relief.

Back for visit I was eager to return to the old neighborhood and see where time had taken that house, the ark of a thousand memories. My last sight of the house on Wabash was years ago, not long after its renovation. The first impression yesterday was of tree growth—the entire neighborhood now overhung with giant live oaks swooping down upon the street. But the house, despite a certain charm that came with its earlier renovation, is beginning to look lived in. Nothing exceptional, only the average signs of life spilling through windows and cracks into the front yard. Hard to say how these things work, but I got that old feeling of home-ness that I remember from throwing my bike down in the front yard and tumbling inside just as Mamma called supper.

A different time, a different family, but the chord stretching forward from long years back still resonates with a feeling of home. Pictures, then and now…

Scattered Moments

Looking for something today ended with a box of old photographs and postcards, the search stalled while I rummaged through scattered moments and seasons from bygone days. Unlike some, I’ve always resisted the notion of aligning old photographs in systematic pages of year and occasion, a layout enabling the viewer linear movement through memories that are better enjoyed in haphazard order. Suppose it could be a way of rehashing the past peculiar to just me, but the catapult from one disjointed old image to another is the kind of reminiscence I savor.

Something warns me that few beside myself will find much meaning or value in the three photographs and two postcards I set aside. Can’t remember when I last looked at these pictures, small and rumpled paper cards that got tossed into a box when I left Japan. Each one of the five rings a distinct tone, has a background that could fill, well…

Postcard from a longtime friend who left Japan after a long stay. For some years all non-Japanese residents of Japan were required to register at a government office called ‘Alien Registration.’ This old postcard is an American card, one probably made by a photographer familiar with Japanese Immigration procedures. From my friend Laura, it brings her back in a thousand ways.

Through the connections of my teacher or deliberations unknown to me, one of my works in brushwriting (shodô) was selected for inclusion in an exhibition. Mine is at the top left in the green frame. Makes me wonder how Motohashi-san, my longtime teacher is getting along.

Picture of my very first desktop in Komae, 1982. Most of the books are dictionaries of one kind or another, the large red one at the left is even now resting at one end of my Florida desk. This photo reminds me of a good friend and the house we rented beside a bamboo grove on the grounds of an old temple.

‘A Man of the World’ (Ein Mann von Welt!), a German postcard from one of my oldest friends, mailed from New York to Tokyo.

A memento of Singapore purchased at a flea market while on holiday in Southeast Asia. The picture caught my eye with its sublime composition of eight family members, almost certainly ethnic Chinese—the unknown photographer a true artist. Oddly enough, looking at the picture brings back a terrible car crash I came through one week earlier in Southern Thailand.

As Dean Martin once sang, “Memories are made of this…”

I Remember Mama

Looking at the most recent post on Everyday Correspondence this morning, I read an article written by Jackie Flaherty called, “Correspondence as…Memories.” The article is about the lasting value of letters and what their content does to bring back vividly the thoughts and days, the memories of earlier years. I will admit that I have not been very good about holding on to letters received, and most of them must be relegated to the lost and unfound. That loss is something I regret, though at this point cannot change.

But reading Jackie’s article, I remembered seeing in a bottom drawer of my desk recently an old letter from my mother, who passed away in 1983, a year after my move to Japan. So, I went back and pulled that faded envelope from its hiding place and sat for an hour reading, re-living not one, but three letters folded inside. They were the last three letters I got from my mother.

So many things unwritten in those flimsy pages came spilling from between the lines as I turned them over again and again. Little written there about her health, but the handwriting told some of the story. The last letter of the three reflected a hand that fought with the pen, not easily keeping lines neat, or letters fluid. Handwriting always neat and well-formed, perfectly legible to anyone had little by little become less so.

She wrote of hoping she would be able to play golf with her friends, and I remembered a hundred things about her and Daddy and their passion for golf. I remembered cabinets piled with silver salvers or bowls from the many golf tournaments. In one part of the letters was a mild complaint that her car was not running well. That brought back to me the times she had poked around under the hood trying to make some minor repair without the help of a mechanic. She wrote about the roses I had wired on Mother’s Day dying the very next day, and the florist coming right over with a fresh armful.

On the last page of the final letter Mama wrote that she hoped I was enjoying my work and life in this far away country, but that she was a little sad it had to be at such a great distance.

I sat with these pages for a while, looking too at some old photos, turning the worn out Kodak moments over in memory, smoothing the old letters and remembering Mama.

As James at Everyday Correspondence so aptly expressed to Jackie about her article… “Thanks Jackie, for your wonderful reflection on the lasting power of letters.”